Nineteenth-Century Prose

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Articles from Vol. 32, No. 2, Fall

British Missionary Publishing, Missionary Celebrity, and Empire

Missionary periodicals dominated the religious press in the early nineteenth century, and the largest British missionary society, the London Missionary Society, disseminated a vast array of religious magazines and books. This essay examines the missionary...

Professor David J. DeLaura, long a Board member of Nineteenth-Century Prose and one of the truly outstanding scholars in the field, died suddenly last April at the age of 74. At the English Departments of the University of Texas (Austin) for a decade...

Exporting Time Immemorial: Writing Land Law Reform in India and Ireland

In this article I trace out a new attention to native custom manifested in writing on both Indian and Irish land law in the 1860s and 1870s. During this time, land reformers treat India and Ireland as occupying a stage of legal development prior to...

Adapting the insights of Mary Douglas, this article examines moments of self-implicating category confusion engendered by the anomalous but linked figures of the gorilla and the cannibal, which appear in a number of important Victorian exploration...

The essays in this special issue of Nineteenth-Century Prose, written from the general standpoint of postcolonial studies, focus on various aspects of writing about empire and imperialism in the 1800s and early 1900s. They deal with missionary publishing...

Narratives of Suffering and National Identity in Boer War South Africa

The poor conditions in the concentration camps run by the British for Afrikaner women and children and African civilians during the Anglo-Boer War of 1899-1902 resulted in thousands of deaths due to disease and poor sanitary conditions. During and...

Press coverage surrounding the 1886 death of Charles 'Chinese' Gordon in Khartoum, Sudan, provides an exemplary instance of the functioning of imperial discourse. Surprisingly, Gordon's lionization as a charismatic imperial leader emerged from lacunae...

Imperialism's impact on urban and rural Britain has been the focus of much literary and cultural criticism, yet such work largely ignores the suburban development that arose during the age of empire. This article reads imperialism as central to the...

Taming the Sublime in Darkest Africa: Stanley's How I Found Livingstone and Burton's Lake Regions of Central Africa

This essay explores how African natives and African landscapes are written in the register of the sublime and how different types of rhetorical appropriation are used to "tame" such apparently dangerous threats to British colonial rule. Writing about...